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Saturday, April 21, 2007

Inside the Sweater ER

*****Warning: Picture heavy post ahead!*****

You will remember that at knit night on Wednesday I made a most unfortunate discovery -- a mis-crossed cable near the top of my Forecast. Frogging was not an option, as far as I was concerned, nor was unraveling/dropping the stitches in the cable and reknitting them the Weirdy Pants way. The only option was the take out the scissors and do some sweater surgery.

Need a hint? I knit both cables in this swatch with the same mistake, but only fixed one of them. Here was the before picture:

Having successfully repaired my swatch, I prepared to do the real deal on my Forecast. I set up for the surgery as follows:

I isolated the row of stitches that would be unraveled by putting a spare dpn underneath it. Using some smooth scrap yarn (in this case some discloth cotton), I installed some lifelines through the stitches in the rows directly above and below the row to be unravled. I had at the ready my embroidery scissors (small, exact blades to ensure I only cut what I wanted to cut) and a length of sweater yarn on a yarn needle.

Next, I cut exactly one leg of the center stitch of the row to be unraveled ...

... and unraveled the three stitches in this row. The stitches in the row above and below remained safe on the scrap yarn.

I placed the stitches on the scrap yarn onto two size 6 dpns (smaller than what I'd used to knit this portion of the sweater). Then, carefully, I eased the dpns under the band of stitches that were previously the bottom part of the cable.

Essentially what you're doing here is taking the stitches that were in the front of the cable cross and pulling them behind to the back.

Here you see the two dps and the tails of the yarn that was cut are all pulled to the wrong side of the fabric:

Now came time to suture the wound. I picked up my yarn needle with the length of sweater yarn and grafted the stitches on the dpns together ...

... and finally wove in all the ends. I turned the sweater to the right side again to admire my handiwork:

Success! Many thanks to Cara for her very helpful tutorial; I followed her instructions to the letter, and you can see they worked beautifully.

Now that that is behind me, I am ready to pick up on this baby where I left off. I finished the body Thursday night and am now ready to begin the sleeves -- you can bet I'll be watching my cables closely from now on!